Goodbye Netscape, Hello Mozilla

Last night I took a step I had been putting off for some time. I
completely deleted all traces of Netscape from this computer. Now I'm
wondering why it took so long.

I'm not sure what made it turn into the computer equivalent of a ball
and chain. But in the past few months it had developed an annoying habit
of not starting. I'd click the icon and nothing would happen for thirty
or more seconds. Then it would come up with sections missing, or I would
just get the toolbar across the top of the screen and nothing else. A
quick Ctrl-Alt-Delete would put it right, but sometimes I would have to
do it twice. Other times it would start with the Netscape 7.2 ID box, if
that's the correct term, like nothing was wrong. I never knew which
thing would happen. The capper finally came when I sat down here
Thursday to find all my bookmarks had disappeared. I figured I would
just reload them from the floppy disc backup, but the disc only
contained a few of them. Most were gone. I had checked the floppy backup
a few days earlier and they were all there. That's when it got spooky. I
don't know if it was a virus or what, but I finally got just plain fed
up. The proverbial straw had finally broken the camel's back.

So now Netscape is gone. It's outta here. I'm using Mozilla Firefox for
my main browser now, with Thunderbird as the email client. I was amazed
at how easily Thunderbird installed and transferred all the address
books and spamguard lists from the old email client. There's also a HTML
authoring client called NVU that does more or less exactly the same
thing as the Netscape Composer, so that's what I'll be using for website
updates. And the floppy backup of the bookmarks reflects exactly what is
currently on the browser. I think I'm going to like this Mozilla thing.

I keep a copy of Internet Explorer around for the occasional website
that is optimized for IE, but that is an increasingly rare thing these
days. I hardly ever use it for anything else because I'm always hearing
of new security holes being discovered in IE. Apparently it's about as
secure as a screen door in a submarine. It's there if I need it, but I
hardly ever click on it.

Sometimes you just gotta do what you just gotta do.

G.T. TYSON